5 Steps to Mental Clarity | Jim Kwik & Dr. Caroline Leaf

I often get asked, what's the most important thing to help with the mental health crisis in children? And I'll say educate the parent.

Dr. Leaf is a clinical and cognitive neuroscientist who specializes in psychoneurobiology and metacognitive neuropsychology. She's also a very prolific author, has a new book, How to Help Your Child Clean Up Their Mental Mess.

Children that touch Gen Z, Gen Alpha, the most medicated generation, and these medications aren't medications, they're drugs. They're psychoactive drugs that change the brain.

We're gonna talk about children, but we're also gonna talk about your inner child. So this is for anybody listening right now.

Thousands of scientists, thousands of studies have shown that when we take the human experience and we limit it down to saying that this is bad and this is good and these are the symptoms to eliminate, which works for medicine, works for the biology of the brain and body, but when it comes to human experience, the entire network, the entire brain and body is impacted by what you're going through.

Welcome back to the Kwik Brain Podcast. I am your host and your brain coach, Jim Kwik of Kwik Learning. We're here as always to help you to learn quickly in 20 minutes or less. Make sure you subscribe to our YouTube channel where we put the extended version. You can join over 1.2 million subscribers there. I highly recommend that's where you consume this, but if you're not, that's okay too. We're going to sum everything up in 20 minutes. And we have a very important topic that we're going to talk about, which is managing your mind, which I think All our audience across the world wants to know more about. And again, if you haven't taken our brain animal quiz, please make sure you do that at mybrainanimal.com and see if you are a fast-acting cheetah, if you're a logical owl, if you're a creative dolphin, or empathetic elephant, and get your free assessment as well. It's absolutely free. You'll get a report on how to take your brain animal type personalized for you on how to learn and how to lead your life. to that version of yourself that is patiently waiting. So without further ado, the question today is how do you manage your mind? How do you manage your focus? How do you manage your thoughts? How do you manage your emotions, your behaviors? On the show, we have back, very, very happy to have back, Dr. Caroline Leaf. Welcome, Dr. Leaf.

Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Jim. It's always great chatting to you and being with, chatting with you about the brain and the mind.

Yeah. Now you and I have geeked out in the past on both our podcasts and also at events where you and I have had the pleasure of sharing the stage. For those of you who don't know, Dr. Leaf is a clinical and cognitive neuroscientist who specializes in psychoneurobiology and metacognitive neuropsychology. Say that 6 times fast. She's also a very prolific author, bestselling author, has a new book, which I highly recommend for everybody. This is How to Help Your Child Clean Up Their Mental Mess. And this is a guide to building resilience and managing mental health. And I really do believe that we're going to talk about children, but we're also going to talk about your inner child. So this is for anybody who not only has a child in their life, but this is for you listening right now. No matter what age or stage you are, this is an essential guide to anyone who wants to teach themselves or teach their children how to improve their cognitive functioning, their emotional resilience, their mental strength. And when we teach children, we teach their children as well. And so how do you master your minds? Teach them to become masters of their own life. And this book will show you how to do that. Now, Dr. Leaf, today we are facing— children and adults are facing a mental health crisis. And we could talk about your way of looking at this, but for sure it's becoming an epidemic and people are showing signs of anxiety, depression more than ever before. And if it's left unaddressed, left to the wind. You know, these mental messes, as you call them, could follow them into teenage years, into adulthood. So how do we help children help themselves? And I'll put a link in the show notes, as I always do, to all the resources for your book, for your social media, also for our past podcast episode, which I highly recommend people listen to. Why don't we start by just delineating the difference? Because sometimes people use the term brain and mind interchangeably. So how do you define the difference?

Well, that's a great place to start, Jim. Thank you. And thanks for that great introduction. Your mind is the ability that we have to think, feel, and choose. And it's also a whole physics component of energy and so on. So the easiest way to understand mind is to think about the fact that your brain— if you were dead, your brain couldn't do anything, your brain would just basically just be disintegrating. But the fact that you can actually listen and watch this podcast, we can have the conversation and you're alive, you're thinking feeling, and choosing in response to this information. And that's the mind. So on a psychological level, it's our ability to think, feel, choose in response to life, and then to take that response and put that into the brain as a bunch of energy, which then stimulates chemical and neurochemical and electromagnetic and all kinds of genetic responses inside the brain. And then the conversation, just to use this example now, your mind takes that, puts that in the brain, and the brain then changes, which is neuroplasticity. You literally wire this conversation in as a— in— like little vibrations inside protein tree-like structures. And as you add more information, it grows, grows, grows. And that then influences your body to also store this memory. So the mind is doing all of that. It's also keeping you alive. It's making your heart beat. It's making your lungs work. As soon as you don't, you die, all of that goes away. So I know that's a big thing, but think of it just in summary as your aliveness having a psychological and a physical component. And it's how we get stuff into the brain and the body and how we help our brain to function like it should.

And so the brain we're looking at is more The 3-pound matter between our ears.

Exactly. It's the responder and it's highly complicated, obviously. I mean, I've been in the field 38 years and you've been in this field a long time as well. And it's very complicated and it needs to be because humanity's complicated. Our mind is complicated. So your mind needs a very complex structure to be able to basically store life. And then the combination of mind, brain, body is how we then show up in life. It's our driver. It stores the driving forces.

And I love this podcast to be about how to be able to manage your mind or master your mind. any age or stage, you know, especially dealing with this growing environment.

Crisis.

Yeah. This, uh, we're post-pandemic, a world full of AI, children and adults who are being inundated with information, distraction. You know, I love models. And, and one of the things I loved about your books is you have something called the neurocycle, right? Which are the, the, this, this 5-step science-based management system to help people of all ages and stages, again, whether they're children to adults, to help them to do things like prevent toxic thoughts, you know, help manage their memories from affecting their mental health. So maybe we could give an abridged version. Maybe, you know, I know it's very dense and people should definitely go through the book because it's extremely practical. And that's what I love about it. But maybe we could go through these 5 steps What do you see as the biggest challenge that children and adults are facing right now when it comes to their environment, you know, the difficulty that's being placed on their nervous system?

Okay, a brilliant question. So we cannot separate ourselves from the environment. The environment's influencing us as humans. It's about us and the environment. And then additionally, every generation brings new challenges. So this is not the first pandemic. We've gone through wars, pandemics before. We've gone through different types of technology. So we've got to be careful of blaming the mental health crisis on technology. Technology per se, or the pandemic per se. We rather need to look at the bigger crisis. The mental health crisis that we talk about is actually a symptom of a bigger crisis, and the bigger crisis is one of mind management, which really goes to the work that you do too, Jim. Because if we are not managing our mind and know how to use social media, know how to deal with all the incredible technology and access to information, that can create a sense of anxiety. It can create a sense of angst. Also, whatever you think about the most is growing in your brain. So if spending all day or hours on social media focusing on that person's body is the way to— that's my identity is wrapped up in what looking like that. You're wiring that into your brain and you're literally looking at life through one view and one lens because you're only thinking about that particular sort of concept. So what we need to understand, and the neurocycle is, as you quite correctly say, it's a system. It's not a new technique or like, for example, they can take everything you teach on this podcast and all the wonderful stuff that is out there. What I've done is brought a model to the table that's based on a 38 years of clinical research. I still do research. I'm still— I currently have a big study running. I publish in journals. So it's very scientific, but it's also very simple and very practical because I've worked with people with all kinds of issues from traumatic brain injuries, which is something you and I have discussed before because of your history, people with trauma, whatever, autism, learning problems. So you need something that it's based on complexity, but it's very simple. So what I saw missing that has contributed to the mind management crisis is a lack of helping people understand how to actually understand what the mind is and how to drive it in the correct way so that you drive the neuroplasticity of the brain in the direction it should go. So there's 2 ways that you approach this, and the one is you either looking at how you show up in any one context in terms of your signals, and those signals would be your emotions, your behaviors, your bodily sensations, and your perspectives, and understanding that those signals are telling us not who we are, but that we are showing up in that way because of something. And the neurocycle can help you manage your mind by standing back and observing how you show up and then going through a process of deconstruction and reconstruction so that you, that you don't have a toxic thought filled with toxic memories driving you because the signals will take you to the toxic tree. So by identifying the signals, you then get to the source, which is the toxic tree, and the source of the tree is the roots, what actually happened and how we've interpreted it. So any cluster of memories is grouped into the source, what actually happened, the interpretation, which how we uniquely think, feel, and choose with our mind, and then the branches, which is the interpretation. So think of thought trees in your brain and then think of the fact that they generate signals and that our whole non-conscious mind is always searching for any toxic trees that are disrupting our function and disrupting— and that could be in anything, memory, work, relationships, just a general sense of anxiety and so on. So the neurocycle is based on how that experience got into the brain, wired into the brain, wired into the body, wired into the mind in the first place, how it shows up, and how you can recognize that and deconstruct it. So the easiest way to understand that application of the neurocycle is to think of flying a plane. Before I explain that, just very quickly, the other application of the neurocycle very much aligns with Limitless and with what you teach in your podcast, and that is how to grow memories in your brain, how to build your knowledge, how to improve and optimize your performance. So that's a huge part of the application of the neurocycle. So it's a system based on science, based on a methodology, based on theory and it can— you can use all kinds of techniques at each stage. The point is, is that if you want to change the network, which is what's driving how you function, either on an optimization level or on a mental health level that you need to deal with something, if you don't change the network in the right way, you can do a bunch of incredible things, but you're not going to have sustainability and long-term change. It takes time to rewire the network because the network is what drives you. So the neurocycle is how do you change that network and over what time period in order to create Sustainable change. So let's quickly come back to a very brief overview of the how it works. CliffsNotes view, think of flying a plane. When a pilot flies a plane, they prepare the plane first with a copilot and engineer. That's brain preparation. That's getting all your neurophysiology and chemicals and energy of your brain all aligned so that you can focus and concentrate. Then the pilot takes off very, very organized, very planned, very guided, very, very specific rules that they have to follow. Then they fly the plane, then they land the plane. And it's a very cyclic process. each thing's very planned, very guided, and very specific to the destination. So the neurocycle has this— is the same concept. We need to first prepare our brain, which is things like meditation and breathing and that kind of thing, which gets your neurophysiology in the correct place and gets your awareness in the correct place. Then you're going to take— the plane needs to take off. That is step 1. That is to gather awareness. So it's gathering awareness of how am I showing up? What are my emotions? What are my behaviors? What am I saying and doing? How does this feel in my body? What are my bodily sensations and what are my perspectives? Then that takes you off. If you if you just do brain preparation and taking off, in other words, if the pilot only knows how to prepare the plane and take off, the pilot will crash. You have to fly the plane. So a lot of current techniques today will teach people how to prepare and take off, but not fly, and that's why people crash. So people are in therapy situations or using different techniques. If they don't fly as well, they crash. So you get a limited benefit, and that's part of the research I've done. So how do we fly the plane? That's steps two, three, and four. The second step is is a very focused refle reflective stage where you start asking questions about those 4 signals. Why do I have them? What are the emotions? What are they linked to? The who, the what, the when, the where, the why. How's it linked to that in my body, that in my perspective? So you start digging down. That takes you neuroscientifically, it activates that network in your brain and makes it conscious. And when, when we conscious of it, we can then change it. So we can start deconstructing and reconstructing. You can't eliminate whatever's happened to you will always be part of your story, but you're changing how it plays out into your future. The 3rd step, which is still fly, is to then capture this, this gathered awareness and reflections, those 2 stages, and to capture them in a written format where you can also incorporate things like visualization and drawings and words. And the idea is not to journal. The idea is to do a mind-brain dump. So whatever comes up, you want to take advantage of your conscious mind connecting with your non-conscious mind and activating the different parts, the sides of the brain, activating the frontal lobe, getting all these gamma waves and all kinds of things happening so that you can dig deep and develop your insight. So Idea and key is to write all over the page, different colors, put words in bubbles, whatever comes to mind, even if it seems completely unrelated, to get that out. Very important stage of flying, and it's very planned and very guided. And then the next step of still flying is to recheck. And to recheck is now going back into what you've now captured on the page, which is step 1 and 2 on into step 3, and to make some sense of it. This has happened. What can I do? How can I reconceptualize? How can I look at this differently? It's standing back and looking at this in multiple, with multiple perspectives, and it's seeing this has happened, how can I move forward? It's looking at triggers, it's looking at all that kind of thing. And then we need to land the plane because your brain has done a lot of work and your brain gets tired, so does your conscious mind. Your non-conscious mind never gets tired, but if our brain and body start wearing down like a cell phone, we're going to start getting anxious and we're going to start feeling on edge and even potentially depressed. So you've got to land the plane, and that's the 5th step, which is called an active reach. And the active reach is some sort of action that you grow out of the previous 4 steps that is something as simple as maybe, okay, I've now working on this why I feel these, this intense level of depression and why I'm withdrawing. And that's good that I'm working on it. I'll pick it up again tomorrow. Or it's some kind of positive affirmation or some kind of little visualization technique. So it just seals the deal for the day and then you pick it up tomorrow because memories don't— networks, which are memories captured inside of thought, thought trees made of memories. That's what we mean by a network, which has 3 different types of representations in the mind-brain-body network. Those will not change in one Neurocycle. It doesn't take 21 days to change a habit that we've built up from bad social media. It doesn't take 21 days to fix a trauma. Any of those, it takes cycles of between 59 and 66 days. And that's a lot of the research I've been doing. We have a big study currently running. I just published a paper on this as well. So I looked at the mind, brain, and body changes in all different levels down to telomeres, hormones, brainwaves, all of it to see how long does it actually take to rewire these networks that you don't just recognize, okay, I can be the change. But it is something that, how can that change become a habit so that it's useful? That if I'm in a situation 3 months from now and I get triggered, that I remember how I used to respond that affected my functionality or detracted from my ability to function at a higher level. I remember that, but I no longer operate in that. I've got this new network that then is what will drive me. So that's kind of a bird's-eye view of the concept.

Hi, this is Jim Kwik, author of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller Limitless. And today I am thrilled to share with you some exciting news. It is Limitless Expanded. It's an updated and brand new edition of my transformative guide, and now it's enriched with new insights and new tools to help you navigate our post-pandemic world. For a limited time, when you preorder your copy of Limitless Expanded, you're going to get exclusive free access to my 13-day Quick Start 2.0 training. It's a brain training plus a bunch of amazing bonuses. Just go to limitlessbook.com and pick up a copy for you and pick up a copy for a friend. I love it. The, um, so a few things that we could deconstruct here. You know, I love it that you could change your mind to be able to change our life and that we are the pilot of our life, not the passenger. Sometimes we feel like we're just at the effect. And we're just kind of riding some kind of, uh, somebody else's, is, is directing course. And I love the analogies and the metaphors that you use, whether it's a tree or it's a plane. Now, just to, to, 2 terms to clarify, you mentioned, uh, conscious and also non-conscious. Maybe we could just quickly define that for, for those listening.

Absolutely. Absolutely. So people, most people have heard of the subconscious and the unconscious, and they think that these are the programs that drive us. It's kind of more complicated than that. The unconscious is when you're asleep or knocked out or under anesthetic. It's a brain state. that you go into. The non-conscious is a very dynamic and active and intelligent state that you're in 24/7. So this is where every single experience that you have as a human from whatever stage in the womb to whatever age you're at now, all, every single experience is being built via the non-conscious mind working with the conscious mind into the non-conscious mind with a representation physically in the brain as a tree, in the body as a change in our cells, and in the mind levels as a biofield. So it operates 24/7. It's not bound by the present, past, and future, and it contains all our experiences. It's very much on our side. It's always searching. It's survival-oriented, wired for love. It's our most intelligent part of us. You can talk about it as your deep spiritual level, however you want to look at it, but it's your driving force, and it's outstandingly brilliant. And we need to tune into that part of, part of us because it's always looking for the disrupting things that are holding us back and sending that through the subconscious. And the Subconscious is a portal or like a doorway that channels these the things that the non-conscious finds that are disruptive to us and sends that through to the conscious mind. Now the conscious mind is much slower than the non-conscious, N-O-N, and and it works with the subconscious. When you're asleep, that's when the non-conscious is always awake. So the conscious when you're asleep, the conscious mind and the subconscious switch off. So the conscious mind and the subconscious are only awake when you're awake. The non-conscious is always working. That's why when we're sleeping, it's sorting out what's happening. Happening in our mind and in our brain and our body. So the conscious then is— the subconscious is the connection between the two. Conscious is slow, but it's brilliant. And the conscious mind is— we want to deliberately and intentionally train our conscious mind to listen to the messages coming through the subconscious from the non-conscious because— and that comes via the signals. So a lot of the work that you teach people to do is to basically develop that skill that's inside the non-conscious but very If that makes sense.

Very, very much so. And I love the visuals. You know, when I saw you on stage once and you actually had props and you were talking about thought trees, and it was a great visual way to explain how experiences impact our brains and our bodies. And I also have this awesome coloring book, Color with Brainy, and Friends, which is— this is— I'm gonna gift this for those of you watching on YouTube as well. Brainy to our boy, because our family gets very brainy and brainiac over that. Why don't we explain to everybody listening what a thought tree is? And actually, how would you define a thought?

Very, very good question. So a thought is basically an experience. And so every experience we have, like this conversation, is an experience. And there's a lot of conversation going on. Every word that I'm saying Every concept and every word you're saying, those are memories of the experience. So think of an experience made up of a lot of memories. And as people are processing this with the mind into the brain, they're building the, this cluster of memories about our mental health and optimizing our mind, whatever you call it, want to call it, into a thought tree. So as I'm speaking and you speaking, that could form the roots inside of our brains of this conversation, cuz it's the source. And then every person's unique individual way of thinking, feeling, and choosing is the tree trunk. And the branches are therefore the result of how you as a unique individual are interpreting what you are hearing. So every experience builds like that, and we have trillions of experiences. So think of an unconscious mind being a huge forest with trillions of trees, and if— and some are big and some are small and some are very green and some are dark looking, which are toxic experiences. And our life's journey is we're driven by those trees. We're driven by the biggest and most dominant trees. So if it's a big toxic tree that's driving us, that's gonna create mental health issues, it's gonna disrupt our confidence and all that kind of thing. So we wanna find these thought trees that are actual protein tree-like structures and the memories are vibrations inside the proteins. So you're busy taking my words and building vibrations inside amino acids grouping into proteins grouping into these tree-like structures with a root system, trunk, and the branches. So that's the thought tree. And you can explain this to children as young as 2, Jim. And that's why I brought this book out because of we wanna equip our kids proactively and we wanna be able to do inner child work as adolescents, teenagers, adults. And so what I've done is I created— You showed Brainy. character and we have Brainy as the head because Brainy, the brain doesn't control us, we can control the brain, which is all the things that you teach. So if you're teaching children in an almost subtle way that, hey, you are actually able to control your life. So Brainy is a little mental health character that walks your mental health journey with you and has a superpower called the Neurocycle. So the book is filled with this cartoon character in this particular book that you mentioned earlier on that's been released. And the coloring book is Coloring with Brainy and Friends and it's different scenarios. So all this stuff we've been discussing now that you can— this mind management that you can use as adults going through the neurocycle, the plane, and so on. You can teach this to children as young as 2. My youngest patients were 2 and 3 years of age. My own 4 adult children have been learning this from very young. And the whole idea is to like trees, for example, these cartoon pictures of trees, and you can show children trees outside and, hey, that happy birthday party experience was a healthy tree. And when your friend upset you, that's a sad tree. And, you know, you can change those trees. You can't pull them out, but you can put plant food on the roots.

But you have to first focus on how you, how you're feeling.

Or, and it could be something as simple as maybe when your child's at daycare and something happens and you, and they come home and they're kicking the seats and throwing a tantrum or something like that. They don't have the words to express that, but they're very insightful. So that whole experience is energy inside a soul tree. And because it's toxic, it's disruptive. So that comes out in how a child behaves, their emotions, they're kicking the chair, getting angry, or whatever it may be. That's not them intentionally being naughty. That is them trying to process something. So what I'm trying to do is with this is help parents and teachers and caregivers and have a way of helping a child process. So this Brainy becomes, for example, a point of contact where you could say something like, oh, I see Brainy's very sad and angry and Brainy's kicking the chair and Brainy's rubbing his tummy. And so you transfer the concept to Brainy, you start demonstrating through modeling, you model the process and then the child starts learning it. And I explain exactly how to do it all in the book. So that's kind of how the process works. But you imagine this and we've done the research where we show the earlier you start with a child proactively, You're giving the child the tools to tell their story, and life is going to happen. So we want to unmask that natural resilience. Doesn't mean they're not going to get upset. They're going to be sad. They're going to cry. Emotions are very normal signals that are telling us things. So we're equipping them to, you know, in a facilitative safety net way, not a hovering helicopter way. We being a safety net type parent where they're learning and experimenting and experiencing, but you're giving them the tools that when they. do fall, that's okay. It doesn't mean you're sick or there's something wrong with your brain. If you have these emotions, if you're battling to learn, we can, we can work out a way to process and rebuild that.

And it's one of those things where I've noticed by going through your process, it also helps remove judgment from the process. Sometimes as a parent, you feel that you're not enough, that you created this mess, which we've all inherited messes, right? Mental messes for generations.

Exactly.

But it takes the judgment off of the judgment we have for people around us, whether they're children or older adults. It also takes the judgment, the self-judgment, which is very useful. So maybe if we get personal here, you mentioned you have 4 adult children. As a mother, what's an example of how you used like the neurocycle to manage mental health issues with your kids? Can you share that?

Absolutely. So 3 things about kids, and I'm gonna give a personal story. Kids are more insightful than we give them credit for. And I actually include studies in the book explaining that because they understand a lot more than they can express. They also respond to authenticity. So the more authentic you are as a parent, adult, teacher, caregiver, the more that they're going to respond. Also, they respond to modeling. So I often get asked, what's the most important thing to help with the mental health crisis in children? And I'll say educate the parent and use it for yourself. So that's been a big policy of bringing kids up is that I have used this to demonstrate with kids. So for example, we had a designated space in our house, did a lot of family therapy, so this I applied with my patients as well. And we have a designated area in our house which happened to be a bay window in the house in South Africa when my kids were growing up. And it was a beautiful bay window. We always put our Christmas tree there and it had a beautiful view. And we had this toy box full of, with like little— this is when they were younger— um, with like art supplies and paper. And it was a pretty area. It was lovely, nice and comfortable little seat there. So if the kids came home from school or they were young or or I was upset about something, I would, if possible, if I was at home, go to that space. So designated space concept being that mind drives everything. We designate spaces. We clean our teeth in the basin in the bathroom. We do yoga on a yoga mat. We cook on the stove. The concept of this is important. I'm going to go to a designated space. So to answer your question with a personal story, that concept of having a designated space is how I brought my kids up, and I would use it by modeling first, then they automatically used it. So let's say I had a bad day or had a very difficult day, maybe with lectures I gave or business meeting, and I felt very frustrated. And I walked in the door and I wasn't maybe friendly enough to the kids because all of us mess up our kids. We all get messy. And that's okay as long as we're managing our mess. And I maybe yelled at the kids or something and got frustrated or said something that I didn't really mean. I could say, oh my gosh. And I could go to— and I did. And I'd go to that designated space and say, okay, I'm so frustrated. I yelled at you. So emotion, behavior. My shoulders were all tense and I kind of looked scary. And that's the bodily sensation. perspective, today my day just sucked. And so I've been honest, I've gathered awareness, and then I'd say, you know, I think this happened because I'm trying to do too much, whatever, whatever the reason was. So I would just give a couple of sentences, not a lot, and then I'd grab my little piece of paper and just draw a couple of faces on or write words depending on what age my kids were at. And I'd put down, this is how I'm feeling at this stage. I have them engaged. They're now coming around. They are saying, Mom, and let me help you. And, and then in that, I can just write a few pictures down. Then they may add some pictures and put some words down depending on whether, you know, they got older, I would write words and describe. They then became engaged. The 4th step we did together, they'd say, hey, maybe, Mom, you could say this, or you could do that. Kids are so full of wisdom. Or maybe you just model, I think I'm going to do this, and this is what happened. And so you're modeling problem solving, you're modeling deep collaboration, you're modeling a facilitative process, you're building deep meaningful relationships, you're telling them even as an adult who supposedly has it all together, we don't have it all together. It's okay to be a mess, but I'm not going to stay a mess. And then maybe the active reach would be something like, let's go play with the dogs in the garden. Or let's go, because we had a huge garden, let's go for a little walk. So there was an action. So by modeling that, my kids knew they came home from school and they, whatever, they would gravitate to that space. And it was an opportunity for us to create this. And as they go into adulthood, they just automatically, because they've grown up with us, we just all apply it. Just last night, my 30-year-old turned around to me and said, oh my gosh, this thing, because something was— something had happened that was really upsetting yesterday, very, upsetting for us as a family. And my, my daughter came out of her room, and she just at some point in the evening, and she just said, I just did a neurocycle. And based on this neurocycle, this is how I'm going to deal with the situation. You know, and that's— so here she's 30. And she's been exposed to this since she was 2. So there's an idea.

And so this could be used with our, with our team. I mean, I know your children work with you. So it's kind of a 2-for-1. But certainly anyone listening to this could apply that in family dynamics. And those family dynamics certainly can play out at work when people are being more aware of their thoughts, their feelings, and knowing that they can make new behavioral choices. Do you have some go-to, or is it individual, of like daily exercises that can help somebody, whether they're a child or their inner child, become more emotionally healthy and resilient?

Yeah, absolutely. So yes, also to your other part of your question was adolescence. Just obviously this book's 2 to 10-year-old, but a lot A lot of adults are using this for inner child work to go back, and it's also very simple. But this book is this one that you interviewed me about last time. This is adolescence and onwards, and we have a neurocycle app. So I take you through the whole process there. I think what's really very powerful as a go-to technique that is an excellent way of learning how to fly the plane and start the process of the neurocycle is to develop what I call the multiple perspective advantage. It's something I talk about throughout my work. And what that is, is this incredible ability we have as humans to stand back observe ourselves. So if you think of it, mind management is managing my mind. The neurocycle is the system within which you can put all the techniques, including the stuff that you teach fits beautifully into the neurocycle. But the active ingredient of mind management and pretty much everything you teach too is self-regulation. And self-regulation starts with us being able to see our impact on ourselves and others, which is very intertwined with empathy. And threaded throughout this is the concept of reconceptualization, seeing things differently. But I feel have to train myself, and this is natural in us, but we do have to develop it. Train myself to recognize how I show up. So that could look like me thinking, okay, well, I wake up and I'm feeling edgy and maybe a bit depressed and just don't feel right. Or maybe there's been a pattern emerging in my life where I'm noticing that I'm just not as creative as before, my memory, or a bit of brain fog. Or so there's a pattern developing, or maybe something in your relationship. The multiple perspective advantage is you standing back and observing yourself, stopping the boat for a moment and just saying, okay, we're stopping the bus. So, okay, let me stop. Let me do a little bit of brain preparation, like breathe in for 3, out for 7, or whatever technique you like doing. Breathing in for 3 and out for 7 where you force it out is brilliant because it pushes oxygen to the front of the brain. It also activates gamma wave activity, which is where neuroplasticity fires up when we're in a gamma state and across left and right. And so if you do that in for 3, out for 7, really forcing the 7, if you do that 6 to 9 times, that's 60 to 90 seconds, you've, you've put yourself in a beautifully aligned state to do the work of the neurocycle. And then as soon as you've done that breathing, then you basically take yourself into the multiple perspective state. And there's the nonjudgmental kindness, compassion where you say, okay, I'm going to stand back and observe myself. This is not who I am. I'm showing up like this because of— and it's okay. It's okay to be a mess. There's no judgment here. And I've even had my patients, and I have a little demo on my reels and my social media of putting 2 2 chairs side by side, and you literally sit in one chair where you say, okay, I'm here, and then you go to the other chair and you talk. So you swap chairs. So little physical things like that can just initiate that process of then going through the neurocycle.

And taking that little pause, you know, with whether a child, something happened to them at school, maybe they were teased or bullied, or maybe as an adult, you're going through social media, and you feel this sensation where you feel a little bit down, and then you start noticing it, it gives you a set of tools as opposed to just, again, kind of being the passenger and just riding that out and just hoping. Because, because hope is not a very effective strategy when it, when it comes to managing our minds.

No, no. You've got to be active. You've got to realize that we are creating this psychoneurobiological network is a very— it's an energetic, alive thing. It's a dynamic. This is not some airy-fairy thing. This is real energy inside real proteins. It's changes in the cytoskeleton of your 37 to 100 trillion cells. This is very, very real. but you have control. So if we don't realize we have control, we just kind of get more and more messy, and then we have good days and bad days. But if we can realize, as you said, that we can direct this process, we then become very empowered to recognize, okay, I'll be messy. I am allowed to cry. I'm allowed to be sad. I'm allowed to feel this in my body. That is giving you the empowerment over that situation instead of it controlling you. You then start to control that. So it's not just, as you say, The hope is part of it, but we need the action to get things in alignment so that we can move forward. So sometimes you may not even feel like it, then say, I don't feel like it. I'm not feeling like this. Well, why? And you can take yourself through the process in that way to help get you into a state where you can start moving forward.

Yeah. And unfortunately, self-regulation is not a big focus in our education system. We see the symptoms of that every single day.

Yeah.

In our lives and on the news. Let me ask you this. Why did you write this book now? You know, how to help your children clean up their mental mess?

So many reasons, but probably one of the main reasons is, you know, I've watched this field for 38 years now and it's really worried me how we've gone from looking at a child and an adult, child, adolescent, adult in the entire experience and recognizing that, hey, how a person is responding, reacting is because of the adverse circumstances or the situation. And we can't just limit it to a simple diagnosis. So we went from being very descriptive and looking at a whole context and interviewing lots of people and taking time to this, okay, these are the symptoms, let's eliminate the symptoms, which is the biomedical model. And that's concerned me. And the research is there evident by not just me, but a lot of other people. Thousands of scientists and thousands of studies have shown that when we take the human experience and we limit it down to saying that this bad and this is good and these are the symptoms to eliminate, which works for medicine. It works for the biology of the brain and body like diabetes and Parkinson's or something like that because it's— we can track them through testing and we can look at the biological basis. But when it comes to human experience, the entire network, the entire brain and body is impacted by what you're going through and it's complicated and it's different. So that's worried me. And so if that system worked to just diagnose and label and potentially medicate, and maybe do a bit of limited therapy or something, if that, or therapy just that goes and doesn't follow proper cycles. If that worked, we would be in a better place now. But we're not, Jim. We're in the worst place than we've ever been. And that's why I said earlier on that the mental health crisis is a symptom of a bigger crisis, which is mind management. You eliminate mind from the process, you're going to land up with what we're seeing in the current crisis. You know, for years, children always came out better when it came to mental health on these global surveys that they do across different countries around the world. And for the last couple of years, That's flipped around where children are battling. I mean, children as young as eight and younger are dying by suicide. There's something wrong with what we're doing in our society. You know, and when a child, an adolescent, is asked, "You feel depressed? Why do you think you feel depressed?" Oh well, I've got a brain disease. Why have you got a brain disease? Because I've got depressed. There's that circular reasoning number one, and that's terrible that a child who's just battling with being a teenager and potentially being feeling left out will spend hours on social media thinking that I have no value unless I look like that person. And I'm using that example. Because it's really a problem of contagion. It's not the social media that's bad; it's the management of the social media. We haven't helped that child process. We haven't given that child the ability to understand what's right and what's wrong, and how it grows in your brain, and how it changes you, and how whatever you think about the most grows. If you take that away from it, from children, we're going to land up with what we see currently at the moment. And children that like Gen Z, Gen Alpha, the most medicated generation, and these medications aren't medications; they're drugs. They're psychoactive drugs that change the brain. So that's really been a huge motivation is to equip. people. The other motivation is that there aren't enough psychologists and therapists around to help every single person. And we all do need help. So we've got to be practical. You can't be relying on an external source for you to cope. That's not healthy. You can't be relying on a parent or a teacher or a therapist to help you cope with life. But that's what we've created. We've created this dependency and codependency on external drives, saying, okay, it's social media. It is your brain. You're battling with mental health. So it's your brain. Something's wrong with your brain. Our brain does get affected. And there is feedback loop. I'm not denying that, but we are minimizing the hugeness of that child or that adolescent or that adult's experience. And so therefore, I wanted to challenge that and empower a child and an adolescent and a parent, a teacher, caregiver, grandparent, that you live with yourself 24/7. Your mind is working 24/7. You need to understand your mind. So does your child, in order for you to know how to deal with that bullying at school before you can talk to a teacher or a parent, or to make sure that your resilience is growing, or when you wake up with yourself in the middle of night with a panic attack and you don't have someone there immediately, you've got to live with yourself. So that's why it's crucial to understand the importance of mind and to give people the tools to manage that, tools to tell their story.

And I appreciate you bringing that up because human beings, they have an immense amount of resilience and resources once they're shown how to be able to curate those. You know, I mean, obviously, you know, for the disclaimer we put on the podcast that This episode is not meant to diagnose or treat any kind of conditions. You could seek a trained professional, ideally that's trained, you know, it's familiar with Dr. Elif's work. But the onus is on us. It'd be too much to put it on an external source, you know, outside the family dynamics, because it is highly complex. But there's hope and there's real help.

Absolutely, there is. And it's so important to understand yourself with that multiple perspective advantage. So this is a way that you can understand yourself and give yourself grace because people are very hard on themselves. Why can't I do that? I've applied those wellness books and I've read those 20,000 books and I've listened to all these podcasts. What's wrong with me? It's to get away from, hey, there's nothing wrong with you or your child. You're showing up in a certain way because of, and let's break this thing down and let's go deep. And yes, as you go deeper with the neurocycle, maybe you see, oh gosh, there is a trauma. There is something. It's not just a habit. Jim, the way I explain it, if you think of a scale of 1 to 10, 1, 2, and 3 would be the daily irritations. Maybe it's a bit of sibling rivalry or someone irritating you at work or traffic, whatever, you know, the little things. The middle of the road is your 4s, 5s, 6s, and 7s, which are the habits we've developed. Maybe we get into a bad habit of getting irritated with a spouse and then it grows into something and we don't control it. And that's not healthy for us. Or it's getting stuck on social media, not managing social media or that kind of thing. That's the middle of the road, but that's wiring in your brain and it's affecting your functioning. So you can use the neurocycle for both of those situations. So the 1s, 2s, 3s, you can use the Neurocycle in the moment to help you. The 4s, 5s, 6s, and 7s, you would have to use the Neurocycle daily for about 5 minutes over 9 weeks, 63 days, in order to wire out that toxic pattern and rewire a healthy pattern. The 8s, 9s, and 10s, those are the big traumas of life. Those are the things that happen to us, like sexual abuse, physical abuse, war trauma, racism, terrible bullying, terrible situations at work, and floods and fires in Hawaii. And these terrible things that happen to us. That is trauma. And those have become embedded in us and we need coping mechanisms because that will wire in an experience that is very frightening. You can't take it away, but we can learn to take that energy that makes us, that drives us in a way that's unhealthy. We can change that energy because energy is never lost. It's only transferred. So through this process of the neurocycle, you can use it along any of those continuums for the time that you need. So trauma would obviously take more than one neurocycle. It's depending on how complex the trauma, but you're learning to take the energy that is consuming you to energy that is actually just now a small little toxic branch on the tree, and it now becomes something that can drive you. So you deconstruct and reconstruct that energy to work for you and not against you. And that's very empowering. And I've shown that with my research as well, that you can get— doing mind management, you can get up to 81% control of those things that consume you. You can get control. And that's like the minimum that you'll see happening.

Wow.

So, I mean, that's just— sorry, I get so excited. Yeah, no, no, I see it in real life.

Yeah, I appreciate your mission. I highly recommend people get their copy of How to Help Your Child. This is not only for parents to want to help their children, but when I read it, it's also a way of almost self-parenting yourself.

Oh, for sure. Jim, it's a— we've had already so— thank you for saying that. We've had so many adults, and I think that was also one of the other reasons I wrote this book was inner child work, which feels so big and confusing. But all our parents have messed us up. We mess up our kids. Unfortunately, that's just the nature of how life works because our parents were once the daughters and sons of other parents, and everyone comes into parenting with baggage. And unfortunately, that does impact our children. But if you have the tools and you've given your child the tools to be able to say, you know, Mom, Dad, you did this, you said that, and you know how to listen with without getting worked up and not being reactive. You can do a neurocycle together to work out the impact of you on your child and the impact of you on them. At the same time, they're honoring that you came to bat. So there's no blame. There's no blame or shame going on here. There's just a very conceptual, deep, deep meaningful way of you going to your inner child and just seeing all these cartoons and the way I've demonstrated in the book with Brainy as a cartoon. It just helps you and the languaging that I use because it's also developmental. I show if it's a 3-year-old versus a 5-year-old versus a 10-year-old. You as adult may need to know how to ask yourself as a 3-year-old that question in that way. You may need to look at Brainy and do the 2-chair exercise. And that works really well. I used to do that kind of inner child work with my adults when we started seeing that, okay, this is potentially something that's still there. It's not healed. So let's now take you to this, back to this place in a very, very safe way where you can then help heal yourself. So in that respect, it's really, really helpful.

Yeah. Brainy is like, I'm just looking at him right now. He's like a superhero. He is a superhero. It's one of the things that I love.

That's what we say. He's a superhero who walks your mental health journey with you. And he's got a superpower called the Neurocycle. So, Jim, what we're also doing is, and they're not ready yet, but my son is a writer. And so we're writing a whole series of books. We've created the universe of Brainy. And we are writing stories of all these concepts, but how, you know, that you can reach your children. And like the first one's about bullying and how to deal with bullying. And it's a whole story about a friend called Lobe, well, a bully called Lobe. And we've taken funny brain terms And so we've got a whole— just to give people the tools to be able to process through. But yes, he's a superhero and we all need a superhero.

Yeah. Dr. Leaf, where can people get their copy of the book and how do they stay in touch with you?

Absolutely. They can get the book wherever books are sold and it's available at the moment. And my social media handles are Dr. Caroline Leaf. Webpage is drleaf.com. Brainy and the coloring book are both available on our webpage, drleaf.com. These, these aren't available just generally. They're on our webpage, but the book's available Or wherever books are sold. And then my podcast is called Cleaning Up the Mental Mess. You've been on that brilliant episode when I interviewed you, and I'll be interviewing you again for sure in the future, hopefully not too distant future. So that's where people get lots of information.

Fantastic. Dr. Leaf, thank you so much. We'll put all the links to everything in the show notes, as we always do, at jimkwik.com/notes. And Dr. Leaf, I want to thank you for the work that you do and and how many people you're helping. And until our next episode, uh, be limitless, everybody.

Thank you so much.